The Northfield Downtown Development Corporation (NDDC) hosted a tourism forum yesterday morning at the Archer House.
L to R on the panel: Kathy Feldbrugge, Northfield Area Chamber of Commerce; Michelle Weber Egeness , CVB Advisory board; Brad Ness, Defeat of Jesse James Days (DJJD); and Hayes Scriven, Northfield Historical Society.
Mary Rossing, president of the NDDC and Chamber Board member, chaired the forum.
Click play to listen. 1 hour, 3 minutes.
I think the group photo says it all re the CVB presentation.
Norm, could you spell it out for me? I missed the meeting and haven’t listened to the podcast.
I asked Kathy and Michelle why, if they believe in collaboration and the importance of the CVB’s Visiting Northfield website, do they not link to nor grab the Flash embed code for the Northfield Entertainment Guide, the best thing out there for promoting Northfield tourism to a nearby audience.
They didn’t have a link to it on the links page, only obscurely at the bottom of the Chamber’s calendar page. I said that it should take someone 60 seconds to fix that. I said that it took me 10 minutes to blog the June NEG with the embed code and a PDF link, that they don’t need a new website to do that, that any web person could easily put it on any of their web pages and change it once/month.
They said they didn’t know about the lack of a link to the NEG and appreciated the feedback. But it was among my laundry list of complaints in my CVB blog post. Maybe neither of them read that, but that’s all the more irritating to me. They’re willing to be on a panel with 20 people in the audience but not willing to pay attention to a discussion where there’s a daily audience of 400-600?
To their credit, the link to the NEG was added to the links page by yesterday afternoon. Why not take a few more minutes and 1) add a linked thumbnail of the NEG cover to a widget sidebar; and 2) add the NEG flash embed code to the Things-to-Do/Culture and Entertainment page?
I wanted to ask this question of Michelle and Kathy after hearing all that the DJJD folks and the James Gang riders do for Northfield tourism for free.
Why not use some CVB money to have the Gang perform their re-enactment someplace strategic where they’ve not done it, eg, the Mall of America in August?
The CVB paid someone to put up the ‘Visit Nfld’ sign on Hwy 3. This would seem to be the same.
Griff,
I want to clarify that I was not sleeping in that picture. LOL, that is probably the worst photo you have ever taken of me.
Don’t feel bad, Hayes. Mary has the same effect on me, too.
JUST KIDDING!!
side note: Newcomers to Northfield organizing event at the Cow tomorrow, 5-7pm.
http://northfield.org/content/northfield-newcomers
Perhaps of interest, an article in the Strib about Mpls’ CVB:
http://www.startribune.com/business/19551269.html?location_refer=Homepage
I was impressed with how much the DJJD committee does with little money. And both Hayes and Brad knew what worked on their respective websites, traffic stats etc. It seems that both Brad and Hayes are accomplishing a lot without a lot of money.
On the other side, the CVB reps could not answer some simple questions and did not provide any tangible evidence that what they were doing is working. No web stats etc. The CVB seemed to take credit for St. Olaf visitors. I think the college does this on their own. They print a nice, but rather generic brochure about Northfield and make it available. Maybe the CVB would be wise to have a Carleton and St. Olaf representative on their board since the Colleges bring a lot of people to town.